Friday, October 22, 2010

New: Speedy Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism detection has been included in the Paper Rater service from Day 1, but we recognize that some users would like to use the plagiarism checker by itself -- separate from the automated proofreading. So, yesterday we quietly launched the standalone Plagiarism Checker as our response. This tool quickly delivers an originality report without the other information provided by the grammar checker tool.

Why would someone want ONLY plagiarism detection?

Most students prefer to run a complete check of their papers including plagiarism, grammar, spelling, word choice, and style. However, teachers are often interested in checking only the originality of the document. The snappy response offered by the Plagiarism Checker gives them exactly what they need.

6 comments:

I like your service, however I can't help but be disappointed in the plagiarism checker. I've submitted multiple essays that have have included direct quotes from websites and your software fails to catch and knowledge them as plagiarism. The only plagiarism your software catches are two word phrases that are as common as the Chicago Cubs disappointing their fans each year (dumb simile, i know). Have you had other complaints about this? I'm a college student and I know I have plagiarized material in my papers (most is quoted though).

Tyler, are you testing by submitting an entire plagiarized work? Or are you just including a few quotes? It sounds like the latter. The plagiarism checker is geared more towards identifying blatant plagiarism, rather than attempting to discern whether a student has properly handled some quotes within a paper. I hope that helps explain things.

I am also disappointed in the plagiarism checker. I have been having my students check their research papers for plagiarism using your site, and imagine my surprise when your product green flagged a paper for plagiarism detection that had entire paragraphs that were word for word from the source. The paper did include internal citations, but the citations were incorrect. I found the plagiarism in about 30 seconds after copying and pasting one sentence from the paper into a google search. In addition, I had a student whose paper got red flagged, but his paper was quite clearly not plagiarized. We looked at his sources and his paraphrases to be certain; furthermore, one of the websites which he supposedly plagiarized was in Spanish. I don't know that we'll be relying on your site in the future, and I had been really excited about it previously.

Providing the specific example of the text would be helpful, but let's take a stab at this anyway...As mentioned previously, the plagiarism detection is aimed at detecting an entire, or mostly, plagiarized paper. For example, a student taking a paragraph from a website and inserting it into a long paper might avoid detection by our plagiarism checker. This is because our service pulls random snippets from the paper and searches for them. The greater the percentage of the paper is plagiarized, the greater the chance that our plagiarism checker will detect it. It would be nice to check every possible snippet, but this would be time-consuming and expensive (we pay for each search), which is a non-starter for a FREE service.

If you have a paper that is largely plagiarized but not detected by our service, please send us the paper (or the URL from which it came) and we will attempt to duplicate your results.

Have you temporarily disabled your plagiarism checker? It was the best of your services-so simple. From about 15 days, I see that the temporarily disabled words come. Why is this?arindom.borah@gmail.com